❛ 𝐖𝐈𝐋𝐃𝐅𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑 ❜ - 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐨 𝐝𝐢 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐨

[ 𝐨𝐧𝐞 ]

     But he couldn't and so he was tied to a boy that he loved half of the year and despised the other. Leopold Beau was a man of many hidden things.

     Hatred was one of them. The silent rage that boiled his blood until nothing but the desire to wrap his hands around the exposed throat of his son and clench his fist was left. How much Leopold hated the boy. Not even the six months of brightness that his son brought his family was enough to bury the will to snap the neck of his child into two, just like a twig.

     Leopold Beau hated his son with a force that would bring whole families to their knees. Lady Hestia would crack his skull open, if he would believe in her, but he didn't, so he didn't care.

The father was normally able to control his inner rage and his most cruel wants, but on the 16th of January, when Liliom cried out in the middle of the night, he was done.

He stood up, his limbs moving in a robotic way, his grey eyes suddenly made out of cold, unforgiving steel. His feet, cladded in socks, stroke the ground in an even pattern. The steps of a soldier marching towards war, surrounded by the red flames of his hatred against the enemy.

     He pushed the door to his sons room open, a giraffe dangling from the doorframe where 𝔏𝔦𝔩𝔦𝔬𝔪 𝔅𝔢𝔞𝔲 was engraved in a soft green color. Leopold saw his son withering, surrounded by dark green sheets that he tossed and turned in.

     Pale skin, sunken cheek bones and a hollow, vulnerable dip at the base of his neck where collarbones met skin. Tiny hands reached through the air and sweat was an everlasting scent in their surroundings.

     Black curls clung to a forehead and red lips were bit open until blood leaked down the soft dip of a chin, onto a trembling neck and then into the hollow dip at the base of his neck. Oh, how badly he wanted to press his thumb into that hollowness until he could feel tiny hands grasping at his skin and could see eyes bulging out of a small skull that was still growing.

     He wanted to kill the boy, and he wanted to do it even more when Liliom screamed and pushed the green blankets off of him and onto the ground.

     Mom, he screamed, the name echoing in the large house. Mama! Bitterness filled Leopold up to the brim. Because how ungrateful could a child be? He had raised him, he had taught him how to hold a gun and he had taught him how to carry burdens that weighted more than Liliom did.

     He had been there, all along. Not that whore of a mother who left them before the day of his only son's birth drew to a close. She hadn't been there, only he had. But the bastard of a son called out to that bitch who couldn't stick around for longer than a few hours.

     How dare he?

     And so Leopold bent downward, hand hovering in the air, over the dip of his child's throat. One second, two, three, fo—

     His hand enclosed around the slim neck and the raven haired boy, ripped from his nightmare, flinched in panic. Green and brown eyes stared up at grey irises, filled with war and destruction, in a panic and Liliom clawed at the hand of his father, the only person that he thought loved him throughout the entire year.

     Oh, how wrong he had been. Leopold Beau has been the only person that hated him throughout the entire year. And so, Leopold Beau crushed his only son's neck in his cruel and with blood tainted hands until there were more splinters than actual bones.

      He left a work of art behind, painted in crimson red, raven black, bark brown and bone white. A mess that once was his son and now was a stain on his perfectly white bedsheets.